Negotiations continue today at UMass University Campus

When the 1,100 nurses of UMass Memorial Medical Center — University Campus go on strike Thursday to protest staffing levels, it will be the largest nurses' strike in Massachusetts history.

It will also be history repeating itself.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association and the national union it's affiliated with have made staffing ratios a priority for years. Disputes about nurse staffing contributed to a 49-day nurses' strike at St. Vincent Hospital 13 years ago, and almost led to another strike there in 2011.

Last month, nurses at Quincy Medical Center walked out of work for 24 hours to protest staffing levels.

Nurses at UMass Memorial's University Campus are staging the 24-hour strike to draw attention to what they call deplorable patient conditions. UMass Memorial has spent $4 million to hire temporary replacement nurses and plans to lock out the striking nurses for five days while the replacements work. Some surgeries and treatments have been postponed.

The hospital said it tried to meet the union's demands by offering to hire more nurses, but the offer was not enough for the union. The MNA believes a nurse should be responsible for no more than five patients at a time.

The union and hospital management have scheduled another negotiating session today, from 2 to 6 p.m. at the DCU Center.

When nurses are asked to care for too many patients, patient care suffers, the union argues. Union representatives point to studies that show higher staffing levels result in better care.

“It's been on our minds for a long time,” said William F. Lahey, an endoscopy nurse at St. Vincent Hospital who was involved with negotiations during the 2000 strike there. “We're just trying to keep people safe. It's been a long, ongoing battle between the Massachusetts Hospital Association and the Massachusetts Nurses Association.”

UMass Memorial, which has settled contracts with nurses at its Memorial and Hahnemann campuses, and with employees from other unions, has set up a website to share its side of contract negotiations and says it has bargained in good faith.

After an unproductive bargaining session on Monday, the hospital said nurses at University Campus rejected the same staffing proposals that nurses at Memorial and Hahnemann agreed to last week. The MNA said hospital management walked out of the talks Monday, forcing University Campus nurses to move ahead with the one-day strike.

Nurses at UMass Memorial last went on strike in 2006 — but only for five hours.

A 2010 study of nurse strikes in New York, conducted by two economists for the Cambridge-based National Bureau of Economic Research, found a link between strikes and patient care: Strikes increase in-hospital mortality and 30-day readmissions. The report studied strikes that lasted much longer than the protest scheduled for Worcester this week.

Squeezed by rising costs, UMass Memorial and other health care systems have made cuts in recent years. UMass Memorial, which has 13,000 employees, laid off 450 last year. It also has sold parts of its business.

New laws are also putting pressure on health care systems. Massachusetts lawmakers passed legislation last year that aims to control health care costs.

“This is a new reality in our state going forward, and I'm not sure that's sunken in with some bargaining units,” said Joshua Archambault, director of health care policy at the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank.

“I think this is the tip of the iceberg of what's to come,” he said about the University Campus strike. “I think you're going to see more and more of this across the state.”

“I think to a large degree it's not so much the issues on the bargaining table, but the nurses' demands to be heard,” he said. “Nursing is a major component of the cost of a hospital. The nurses are very much worried that unless they speak out, the brunt of the cost will fall on them.”

The MNA is holding a rally for striking nurses Wednesday evening in Worcester. The strike will begin at 6 a.m. Thursday.